AustLit

'MARTIN O’MEARA, A Tipperary man who had enlisted in Perth, was awarded the Victoria Cross (VC) for carrying both wounded comrades and ammunition under shellfire at Pozières in August 1916. In 1919, he returned to Perth with three wounds and sergeant’s stripes. The 1963 reference work They Dared Mightily coyly notes that soon after the war ‘his health broke down completely’. What it did not reveal was that O’Meara also returned with ‘delusional insanity, with hallucinations…extremely homicidal and suicidal’. Committed to the insane ward at Claremont repatriation hospital, where he was usually held ‘in restraint’, he died in 1935, his sanity destroyed by the war. By then, another Western Australian VC, Hugo Throssell, had taken his own life in 1933. ‘My old war head is going phut,’ he confided to friends. Curiously, neither O’Meara’s nor Throssell’s trauma seem to attract much attention in the slew of books extolling VC heroes... ' (Introduction)

'IT IS A curious thing, perhaps unique to Australia, that someone appraising the phenomenon of Anzac – that shared national oath to remember military sacrifice and honour wartime service – must first present genealogical military credentials. It’s a defensive move; it declares you share the Anzac spirit, and have a claim to it – an inoculation of sorts against the charge of being unqualified to speak to a topic of such secular sacredness.' (Introduction)